How To Preserve Family History

I have been sewing since I was a teenager back in 60′s. When I got married my husband bought me a new Brother sewing machine for Christmas.  I have been sewing off and on since then. But in the early 1990′s I learned how to quilt. I make quilts for everyone. I even give them as gifts. As you can see I do a lot of quilting. The girls at my local JoAnne Fabrics know me. Since I do a lot of quilting, I have a lot of fabric left over. I didn’t know what to do with the excessive fabric.  I read on my one my quilting newsletters that a teacher in New Jersey was teaching her students how to quilt after school hours and was looking for fabric donations. So I decided to send her all of my excessive fabric. The down side to that is that it cost me some money to send it. Thank goodness the package didn’t have that far to travel. But I deducted the cost of my income taxes.

Still continuing to quilt and having left over fabric,  I soon had another pile of excess fabric. I looked around the internet to see what I could do with all of this fabric.  I decided to use the left over fabric and make scrap quilts and then donate them. Again to send them out, it would cost me a small fortune. I looked at local organizations but couldn’t decide on which one to give my quilts to.   Then I came across an article about The American Red Cross. That was it. I was going to donate my handmade quilts to the local Red Cross.   The lady in charge was thrilled to have the quilts. Apparently that’s all The Red Cross will take are blankets, quilts. I had a paper all filled out describing the quilts and asked the woman in charge to sign the paper for income tax purposes. She was happy to sign the paper. She even gave me her card. I was so happy that my hand made quilts would be used for a worth while cause. I have another round of quilts to give to The Red Cross.

But in the process of making these quilts, I messed up one of the quilts big time. I couldn’t throw it away, so I put it aside and thought about ripping it all apart and starting over but that was too much work. I let it sit for a couple of months and then I just put a backing on it and decided to give it to my dog. See I made a  quilt for my dog e before. I just sewed strips together and put backing on it. My dog loved it.

I had this quilt put aside for when my dog when she would need it. In the meantime I met a woman who worked with an organization that rescues animals. I  made her a few quilts for the animals. Two of the quilts I have are for cats. I didn’t have a lot of matching fabric so it is a really small quilt but the ideal size for a cat.  My mother had some old blankets and bedspreads that she was giving away, I took them for the animal rescue organization. The woman in charge was thankful for all the donations. This time I took pictures and put them on a disk, wrote the description down on a piece of paper and put the piece of paper in with my income tax information so I know when I go to do my income tax next year, I will have all of the quilts I made on file.

If any of you out there who make quilts and don’t know what to do with your excess fabric, here are some examples for you.  I feel good knowing that I am helping both humans and animals. Here are some quilts I made for the animals.